Doing My Part for the Echo Chamber

He’d only spoken to a woman online, found out where she lived and other details about her, and then went to her residence to introduce himself. He’d only freaked out two women enough that they called the police. What imminent danger could he possibly have been to others?

And while I’m busy noting the huge fucking problem that is indifference to misogyny, I think I’ll also just casually point out to a certain someone who thinks that people who make online threats never act on them that, actually, sometimes they fucking do….

I know there are, for various reasons, some guys who just can’t get on the “taking threats against women seriously” bandwagon, but if “Presents an imminent danger to others as a result of mental illness” had been checked [on his psych evaluation] because Cho’s stalking of women had been treated seriously, maybe—just maybe—those 32 people in Virginia wouldn’t be dead, including 18 men.

She also points to an awesome column by Bob Herbert, which you unfortunately need a Times Select account to access. (When, when are they going to knock that shit off like every other decent paper?)

[A] close look at the patterns of murderous violence in the U.S. reveals some remarkable consistencies, wherever the individual atrocities may have occurred. In case after case, decade after decade, the killers have been shown to be young men riddled with shame and humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody.